Mathias Brandewinder

Speaking Sessions

• Crunching through big data with MBrace, Azure and F#

  3:30 PM Saturday   Room: C101B

  For data exploration and rapid prototyping, the productivity of an interactive scripting environment is hard to beat: simply grab data, run code, and iterate based on immediate feedback. However, that story starts to break down when the data you have to process is big, or the computations expensive. Your local machine becomes the bottleneck, and you are left with a slow and unresponsive environment. In this talk, we will introduce MBrace.io, an open-source and free engine for scalable cloud programming. Using the MBrace programming model, you can keep working in your beloved familiar scripting environment, and easily execute C# or F# code on a cluster of machines on Azure. We will focus primarily on live demos, from provisioning an Azure cluster, to analyzing large datasets in a distributed fashion; in particular, we will discuss how this setup is relevant to data science and machine learning.

• The T in TDD: Test, Types, Tales

  11:15 AM Saturday   Room: C101C

  Test-Driven Development is about writing a test first, then the code that satisfies the test. Or... is it? Classic TDD has been crucial in my growth as a developer; and yet, as I started using F# more and C# less, my coding practices have evolved dramatically. Nowadays, I barely test first, but spend my days in the scripting environment. In this talk, I will examine how I used to code, and how I write code in F# today, in a style I consider very much inspired by TDD; I will also discuss how exploring two paradigms (C# and F#) lead me to re-examine my beliefs and practices.